How to Silence the Facebook Screaming - Hide unwanted posts and applications on Facebook

Published
Wednesday, March 10, 2010 3:26 PM

My wife is always complaining to me “I can't stand reading this person's updates on Facebook”, or “I am so tired of people asking for help in Farmville”. So I thought that perhaps other people might find it useful to block those annoying post in the news stream, which is quite simple and I will show you how.

There are several things you can do in the news stream. You can block people which will prevent them from showing up in your news stream at all. This is handy for those people you still want to drop in on every once in a while but don't want to hear every little thing that's going on with them.

The other is hiding applications, which allows you to hide all posts by an application no matter who is posting through it, you won't have to read about it. This is great because once you start hiding applications your news stream starts to become useful again and full of actual posts and not nonsense game requests, and horoscopes.

To hide people or applications all you have to do is hit the little hide button next to the post. If the post is from an application you will be given a choice whether or not to hide the application or the person. If you choose the application you will not receive anymore post from that application no matter who posts them. If you choose the person no more of that person's post will appear in your news feed not just their application posts. If the post is not from an application Facebook will confirm that you want to hide that person's posts.

If at some point you want to unhide applications or people all you have to do is click the “Edit Options” button at the bottom of your news feed. It will show you a list of all your hidden applications and people and you can choose to add them back to your news feed.

You can always use Facebook lite which doesn't have any applications and is a simpler broken down version of Facebook. You can login to Facebook lite at lite.facebook.com

I hope this helps and I hope it brings a little bit of life back into your Facebook experience.